Hope, or: The Beginning of Love

1.
And Gertler, too, is dying.

[private]2.
Later, crossing the bridge over the Onyar River away from the Jewish Quarter, we come to a shop just off Placa de Independencia where they sell the xocolata you’ve been talking about, the thick chocolate drink you eat with churros – those crusty worm-like donuts. We’d spent the morning in the Jewish Museum on Carrer Sant Lorenc in Girona wrapped in a delicious kind of diasporic sadness. One of the brochures says this was the birthplace of the Kabbalah. It’s hard to be sure about these things when our people never stay put.
You order churros and xocolata for both of us.
“It’s a bit like chocolate mousse warmed up,” you say.
“I like it when you order for us in Spanish,” I say.
“You’ll do the same when we go to Israel,” you say.
“I like my lovers to know things I don’t.”
“I dated this Pakistani guy once,” you say. “He used to recite suras to me in bed.”
“So where’s he now,” I say.
“He got some job at Harvard,” you say. “And just took off.”
And I think: Gabriel – this is what I think: You’re the kind of man who gets left behind.

3.
I want from love only the beginning. The excitement, the uncertainty, the desire to know completely. You say I’ve brought you back to Barcelona, but I insist we’ve taken this journey together – it’s our journey. I see you falling in love and I want to run away. You say: “I’ve never met anyone like you.” You say: “When you leave, I feel like I’ve been wrapped in kisses.” And I’m ready to leave right there and then. I want only the beginning. Count me out of the relationship thing. I’m fit only to judge and topple. It’s safer to leave me alone. I was made in God’s image – full of ambivalence and psychotic rage, the kind that’ll leave only a few animals and enough family members to build a boat.
“What baffles me,” I say to you. “Is how do you fill the months and years of being with someone?”
“Fill wouldn’t be the word I’d use,” you say.
“What then?” I say.
“Share,” you say.
“That’s because you’re a hippy,” I say.

4.
Dear Virginia Ironside: I’ve been dating my boyfriend for three weeks. Is it normal for him to want to marry me after just 21 days?

5.
There was a Swedish painter in one of the rooms down the corridor from Gertler’s, a man with strings of hair on his head, hanging off his scalp like a cape. He told Gertler he was sick of doing abstract work, sick of vomiting himself onto the blank page, so he’d turned to nature – for the surprise of order and chaos and for what nature can teach us; Nature itself is our best teacher. The Swede marches into the woods each morning to work on his three paintings, crawls up and down the hill. He’s good enough company, but he’s a very poor listener and, as far as Gertler can tell, too afraid to create his own painterly language: the colours are strong, the images are precise, but there is nothing of him in them.
“It’s all well and good to say: this is what appears before me,” Gertler says. “But you have to own it, you have to find ways to make it your own.”
“Ag,” the painter says. “I am not anymore interested in feelings. Enough of that vomit.”

6.
Now I sit in the hotel bar while Gabriel rests upstairs in our room. Who are you, this man who has come to see me off on my wild goose chase after Mark Gertler, an East End Jewish painter with suicidal tendencies. I want to go upstairs, wake you and say: I don’t deserve someone as wonderful as you. I’ve been walking around too long without a “we” or an “us” in my lexicon. But I wait in the bar, and while I wait for you to come down, I read from Gertler’s letter to Nevinson: “Rivals we are destined to be and rivals we must remain. We must be rivals openly, really rivals dramatically and theatrically and not friends, I am sorry but that is how it must be.”
We go out for a late lunch in the Bari Gotic: paella with crabs and prawns and langoustine and chunks of squid and mussels – all tinted and perfumed with saffron. All unkosher, treif, but you assure me you want to eat them; you say my excitement is infectious. Cassandra Wilson plays in the background, her mournful, crisp rendition of Van Morrison’s “Tupelo Honey”. A table of Catalans, three men and two women, loud and gesticulating, discuss something of consequence (political? sexual?) all with cigarettes. This is where you used to come after class, you tell me, during the months you lived with the woman from London you fell in love with and followed to Spain. I can’t imagine packing my bags and going anywhere after anyone, except for the dead, the ones that I’ve missed already.
The waiter and I flirt with each other as if you and I are just friends. Betrayal’s an exciting option. I’m a toxic audience when it comes to telling me your stories. You’d be so easy to hurt, I think. Stop showing me your wounds.
“It’s the same waiter who’s always been here,” you say.
“Does he remember you?” I say.
“No,” you say, smiling. “But he seems to remember you.”

7.
Soon after the Catalans conquered Sardinia in 990 they built the church of Santa Maria del Mar. It was the first thing the sailors saw when they sailed into Barcelona, the place they went to thank the Virgin for keeping them afloat. Now, the insides of the Church have been gutted, cleared out during the Spanish Civil War. The smell is clean damp and burning candles.
We walk along the sea-front, the sand grainy, unrefined. There’s a feeling when you amble along a boardwalk with someone that somehow you are part of normal human existence, that somehow you and everyone else are the same, or maybe it’s what happens when you’re this close to the sea or to a force of nature that renders all human things – all human life – inconsequential.
I think of writing to my father: “I am not alone,” I will say. “I’ve met a man you’d like. There’s nothing he can’t do. He builds beds and installs windows. He paints and sculpts and cooks. He laughs at my jokes, insists I’m funny. He’s more of a Capricorn than a Sagittarius – he doesn’t blurt out his passion, he’s cautious – even though our birthdays are only one day apart.”

8.
Gabriel flies back to London and I take the train to Sitges. It’s where Gertler spent a summer, if he did spend a summer there, in 1919, his depression exacerbated by the heat.

9.
Dear Gabriel, It’s strange after three days in Girona and Barcelona to now be without you. Who’ll point things out to me and say: Look. You’ve taught me that colours are things, material, objects that get ground down, melted, crushed. Colours are not just adjectives. My first course has arrived, my Xato de Sitges – a typical local dish – so I’ll pause. It’s a salad of raw cod with anchovies and tuna on a mound of escarole lettuce, with a skull-cap of tomato sauce. I’m eating olives to modify the intensity of the fish. It’s exciting and overwhelming to eat raw flesh, there is a sense of danger; the impact is amplified when eating alone – there’s no way to diffuse the event with words or sounds.
The Xato has been taken away and the seafood risotto has arrived; it is creamy and pink and there’s a single chive laid diagonally across the rice. I eat slowly, my body still reeling from the shock of raw cod. The delicacy of this cooked dish inspires caution and reverence in me.
For dessert: Catalan Crème Brulée, a chocolate cigarillo across the top to echo the risotto’s chive. Are we stumbling upon a metaphor here, a symbol for the thin line that… the line that is more like a crack… the fissure that I am to ingest. It’s the crack, the Kabbalah says, that lets the light in, the broken illumine the world. Everything here is perfect – the food, the music, the chatter around me: the French couple at the table behind me.
“J’adore cette,“ the woman says, and crunches loudly into something.
Gabriel, this writing to you heightens all sense of enjoyment, makes me feel like a couple. And then, as if to answer the noisy food question, the waiter places four thin hazelnut biscuits and a lantern of wine on my table. I’m not sure if you’re supposed to pour the wine into a glass or onto the biscuits, so I ignore it, pretend I don’t drink; a request for knowledge leaves me open to humiliation.

10.
Gertler stood at the glass door on Passeig de la Ribera looking out across the gravel promenade to the church. At that time of day – sunset just after 6pm – the blues were turning to aquamarine, the world was lapis lazuli. The gas lamps along the promenade still hadn’t been lit, but the church was illuminated, a blazing gold as if the walls themselves were the source of light, glowing against the darkening azure sky. Prussian blue, sap green and renaissance gold were the only colours. And then it was dark and Gertler lit some candles in his room, and in the glass door which the darkness had transformed into a mirror, his image appeared: thick black hair, thin face, white cotton shirt with buttons left undone and his skin barely distinguishable from the pale fabric.

11.
In the morning I walk with the sun still low in the sky, turning the calm sea silver so that the water dazzles. In the distance, a dark dot: a boat? seaweed? a seagull? the light playing tricks on the water? Sun-warmth on my body. From the word go I want only honesty, true things, essence. It helps not to be angry at the landscape, disgruntled by the view from the window. Let’s not even think about London’s cold grey mornings and what they’ve been doing to me at the start of each day. Here sunlight comes through the glass doors to wake me. The wind in the palm trees and the sound of waves breaking. A man cycles to work. Three people stand on the beach close to the water while their dogs play in the sand. Someone’s preparing breakfast, someone’s making hasty love before work, someone’s having an early-morning argument.
I am trying to keep a positive outlook.

12.
Gertler tried to kill himself today. He cut his throat, then sliced at a vein in his arm. Marjorie raced back from Spain, where only days later civil war broke out and Luke was stranded in Tossa with his nanny and another friend of Marjorie’s (Not the little homo. But then, Carrington had gone off with one fag, so why shouldn’t Marjorie leave him for this one, with his thick purple oily veiny penis).
Now he lay with the blanket up to his neck and shivered. He held the cup with both hands, as if one hand could steady the other, and the cup a crutch in the middle. The cake was a Victoria sponge. Just one slice. Thursdays was Victoria sponge; yesterday was the last of the fruitcake. He held the tea close to his nose, inhaling its steam. Once he let go of the cup, he would smell his wounds, his own blood. The smell was of rotting flesh, of fried pork.
“Hello, Mark,” she said. It was Marjorie. “How are you?”
“Damned awful,” he said.
He hated it when people snuck in like that, crept around corners.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said.
“You could have waited till I looked up,” he said. “I was just enjoying a spot of peace and quiet.”
“Should I go?” Marjorie said. She had a bunch of daffodils in her hand.
Gertler said nothing, though he knew he should be saying: I apologise. I apologise all over again. Please don’t go.
She sat by his bed and he took her hand and held it against his lips. It was cool and still smelled of the daffodil stalks, earthy, with a hint of manure. He had nothing to say. He wondered if it was possible to stay silent from now on, to keep everything to himself now that there was so little left. She had that look of pity in her eyes.
“I don’t think you know how to be happy,” she said.
“Is that the aim of it all?” Gertler frowned. “Is that what we’re working towards?”
He felt the undertone of misery in everything he said. He wondered how it would all end. In his room in Mundesley looking out the window, the scabs forming on his skin, being wiped and cared for by Marjorie, and later, by the night nurse who’ll page through his book about Picasso and ask him to explain the meaning of it all.
What he noticed over the next couple of days was that the heads of the daffodils bowed the lowest when they were just about to open. He saw the symbolism in that – our blossoming comes just after we are at our meekest, our most humble – and so allowed himself to entertain a flicker of hope.[/private]

This extract from Shaun Levin’s novel, Whitechapel Boys, focuses on the life of Mark Gertler, a Jewish painter who grew up in the East End, studied at the Slade, and was close to some of the Bloomsbury group. One of Gertler’s major works, “Merry-Go-Round,” hangs in Tate Britain. Another extract from Whitechapel Boys won the Moment-Karma Fiction Prize in 2006. Extracts from the Isaac Rosenberg section of the novel appear in Desperate Remedies (Apis Books, 2008) and as the monograph Isaac Rosenberg’s Journey to Arras: A Meditation (Cecil Woolf, 2008). Shaun is the author of Seven Sweet Things and A Year of Two Summers. He is the editor of Chroma: A Queer Literary Journal.